


The Mind-Body Problem

by prosodiical



Category: Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, F/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 16:23:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8998096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prosodiical/pseuds/prosodiical
Summary: Hajime's being haunted by a ghost, but maybe she's more than just a memory he can't forget.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NightsMistress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/gifts).



> I loved your prompts, and I hope you like this! Happy Yuletide :)

"You could restore them from the last data point. It'd work... maybe."

Chiaki's sitting on the bench next to his computer system when Hajime looks up from his code, his fingers pausing over the keys. "Hey," she says, smiling, and Hajime glances around the empty lab and sighs.

"I could," he says. "It'll take longer, though."

"But if you just restore them from before the Neo World Program..."

"Yeah," Hajime says. She almost looks solid until his eyes focus on the things behind her, until he can see the edge of the bench under her flickering hands. She's some sort of remnant of his mind, he thinks; as Izuru he'd never had this problem, but he'd spent hours mulling over the essences of hope and despair at her grave. Perhaps it's payback, or perhaps it's the longing that still sticks his words in his throat. "They need to remember something of the island," he says, and Chiaki kicks her legs, the sound of her shoes against metal echoing through the room.

"You can do it," she says. "Don't worry."

When he looks at her she's smiling, just a bit. "Yeah," he says. "I know."

He can feel her eyes on him as he works through the program, pseudocode in his mind to functions from his fingertips to the screen. He's used to it, by now: her watching him, and him trying to ignore it. It'd be no good for any of the others to see how much he's still lost.

"You're doing better, aren't you?" she says, after a while. He glances up at her, and her head is tilted, curious. "Hajime. Izuru." He thinks he's solved some of his own problems, focusing his abilities on _helping_ , but he's never really been two people except for that moment in the simulation. He's always just been himself.

"It wasn't like that," he says, but he's trying to explain it to himself, this figment of his imagination, and he can't form it into words. But he must need this explanation if his brain is throwing it in her guise, so he swallows, rubbing his hand over his eyes. "I mean..."

"No," she says, "it's okay. I was just wondering," and when he looks at her she looks away. "You're just... different now, Hajime."

"I haven't," he starts, but he bites his tongue on _changed_ , knowing it's untrue. "I still remember everything," he says instead. "I still remember you."

She smiles at him, quick and bright. "I'm glad. I don't want to be forgotten... and she wouldn't, either."

He glances at her, but she's looking at her hands, translucent under the light. "Why aren't you her?" he wonders, and she looks up at him with wide, startled eyes. "I mean, if you're going to haunt me, why..."

"Oh," she says. Her voice is quiet. "I'm sorry."

Hajime reaches out to her, but she flickers out before his eyes; the apology is stuck behind his teeth. She's a hallucination, a ghost, a memory preserved - so why does it still hurt? "I didn't mean it like that," he says to the air. "But..."

It's stupid. She's gone. Hajime goes back to his code; that, at least, is something he can fix.

* * *

The problem is, she doesn't disappear forever. When everyone's awake again, when Hajime is only ever occasionally left alone with his thoughts, she's sometimes lingering on the edges of their class, her expression quiet and longing as she watches them. Sometimes, alone, they talk. And Hajime doesn't always dream with the sharp and clear lines of consciousness, but when he does she's always there. 

Tonight, the fuzziness of dream-location gains slow clarity until it's a beach, sand stretching out for miles and salt heavy in the air. She's sitting on a sandbank and looks up when he approaches.

"It was good to see Naegi-kun again," she says, as Hajime drops to the ground beside her. "But... will you guys be okay?"

Hajime considers it, watching the waves creep up along the sand. "I don't know, for everyone," he admits. "It's going to be hard. But someone needed to take the blame."

"And it might as well be you?" She runs her fingers through the sand, looking thoughtful. "I guess it's good, that they have you. Sand's kind of weird, isn't it?"

"We had sand in the Neo World Program," Hajime reminds her, and she smiles at him, quick and pleased.

"Maybe," she says, "but it wasn't really like this."

Hajime rises to his feet again, holding out his hand; she takes it, here solid and breathing like she never is in life. "Then," he says, "let's go."

He takes her to the edge of the beach, where the waves hit the sand, where it clumps between her fingers. He thinks of buckets and sandcastles and soon they're everywhere, a vast town constructed as she adds another turret, tongue poking out as she frowns in concentration; he dreams of fish and seagulls and she watches them with bright eyes from the shore. "This is amazing," she says, beaming, her face upturned, and he misses her with a fierceness that hurts.

It's just a dream. It's just a dream when he takes her to a fairground, where she marvels at fairy-floss and keeps up with him in all the carnival games; it's just a dream when he meets her in school, her expression bright and interested as they walk around, brushing hands. "Why are you still here?" he asks her there, sitting on the edge of his classroom desk, and she looks away like it hurts.

"I don't want to leave you," she admits. "Do you?"

"No," he says. "Don't go."

It feels like he's clinging to memories, like he's living in some idealised version of their past. He says it to her over mugs of hot chocolate, their breaths frosting in the snow, and she sighs and doesn't meet his gaze. "Maybe it's me," she says, instead. "Maybe I don't want to let you go."

"You died," Hajime says. "Chiaki - "

"Maybe," she says quietly, "I didn't, not entirely."

She's a figment of his imagination, a fixture in his head. "You can't be," he says blankly, and she gives him a quicksilver smile.

"Do I need to surprise you?"

"You already have." He watches the shadows her eyelashes cast on her cheeks, the warm flush that the cold has brought to her face. "How?"

"An accident, maybe, or a last resort. I don't remember much from then, but doesn't everyone want to live?" She sighs. The shoulders of her coat are covered in snowflakes, and they're slowly melting in her hair. "I can't be your head-crab forever, Hajime. Sooner or later..."

"You take over all my autonomous functions and I turn into a zombie?"

Her expression turns thoughtful. "The analogy doesn't work that well, huh?"

"I don't know if I can believe it," Hajime says, his throat tight. He looks at his hands. "I just - I want it too badly."

"If we had the simulation," Chiaki says, "I could manifest, maybe. I'm still myself, even if I'm in your head. But it's gone now, right?"

Hajime shakes his head. "We left all the equipment on Jabberwock Island."

"Then," she says, "I guess it's how much you trust yourself." She glances up at him, and smiles a little tremulously. "Sometimes, I barely feel like a program anymore. I don't know - what's me, and what's your memories of me, and what's the parts of me that were her - it's getting muddled, I don't think code is supposed to exist in a biological brain, and..."

"Chiaki," Hajime says, and she leans forward, pressing her mouth to his cheek. Her lips are dry and warm. "I don't - "

"It's hurting you, isn't it? Not knowing?" She rises to her feet, tucking her scarf tighter around her neck, and sticks her gloved hands in her pockets. "I don't know. I just thought... if you knew what I knew, maybe it would help."

"If you're real," Hajime says, "I'll find a way. If you're not..."

"If I'm not," she says quietly, "wouldn't you want to know?"

Hajime bites his tongue on a _no_.

* * *

What makes a person, anyway? Hajime's dream sets them on the edge of a lake, and she skips rocks, taking the challenge like a game. "Do you believe I'm real?" she wonders, and he doesn't know.

The stone he chooses is ideal, smooth and oval, and he made this, too. When he closes his hand around it, it dissipates into the air. "What's it like?" he asks. "Being - being you."

"Now?" she asks. Her stones are perfect, too. She throws it precisely, and it skips ten, fifteen, twenty times across the water, disturbing the ducks into flapping into the air. "I don't know. It's like... everything I am is weird, somehow. It was different in the simulation, I think."

Hajime says, "You can affect the dream, too." Her eyebrows pull together, her mouth confused, and he reaches out and takes her hand. "Can you show me?"

"I might need some practice," she says, glancing up at him through her eyelashes, and this time when she concentrates the world falls away.

The place she takes them to is abstraction made real, some analogue of a program in his visual space. It reminds Hajime of being in the simulation the last time, when the world started to break down around them; of seeing her in that space between reality and construction and hearing her speak for the last time. "Chiaki," he says. Her eyes are closed, and then slowly, as if in a dream, she falls apart.

She's still holding his hand. Hajime can interpret it as a sensation in his brain, as an action in her lines of code, but abstractly she's a bundle of functions and memory hastily shoved together. The base of her is beautiful, clean programmed lines, and then their memories, her personality matrices, everything else is a mishmash of perspectives and lost lines of code patched up with amateur repairs. She's been fixing herself, he realises, though she never knew how, was barely designed with it in mind. 

He also realises, quite abruptly, that he's never thought of her this way before. In the abstract, maybe, but in his head she's always - 

"Hey," she protests. When he looks at her she's real again, holding his hand and standing by the edge of the lake. "I didn't have it yet, I think."

"No," Hajime says, "it's okay. I believe you."

She looks at him with bemusement, the start of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "Hajime," she says, and when he ducks his head to kiss her she meets him halfway.

He has work to do; like she said, she can't stay in his head forever, and he doesn't think he wants her to. But she's more than a ghost, more than a memory, and that's more than enough.

Though it sparks the realisation: "Did you really tell me you were real because I wanted to kiss you?"

She gives him a sly look. "I wanted to, too," she says, and interlaces their fingers together. "Now, come on. Don't you have a world to show me?"

"One thing at a time," Hajime says, smiling. And maybe one day, he'll show them to her in the real world, too.


End file.
